Social animals are capable of enhancing their awareness by paying attention to their neighbors, and prey found in groups can also confuse their predators. Both sides of these sensory benefits have long been appreciated, yet less is known of how the perception of events from the perspectives of both prey and predator can interact to influence their encounters. Here we examined how a visual senso...

Despite extensive empirical research and previous reviews, no clear patterns regarding the effects of habitat loss and fragmentation on predator–prey interactions have emerged. We suggest that this is because empirical researchers do not design their studies to test specific hypotheses arising from the theoretical literature. In fact, theoretical work is almost completely ignored by empirical r...

Understanding the diving behaviour of diving predators in relation to concomitant prey distribution could have major practical applications in conservation biology by allowing the assessment of how changes in fine scale prey distribution impact foraging efficiency and ultimately population dynamics. The southern elephant seal (Mirounga leonina, hereafter SES), the largest phocid, is a major pre...

We propose an optimal control framework to describe intra-seasonal predator-prey interactions, which are characterized by a continuous-time dynamical model comprising predator and prey density, as well as the energy budget of the prey over the length of a season. The model includes a time-dependent decision variable for the prey, representing the portion of the prey population in time that is a...

The raptorial ciliate Mesodinium pulex (Claparéde & Lachmann, 1858) was fed 3 different prey species: Rhodomonas salina, Heterocapsa rotundata and Gymnodinium simplex. Each prey displayed different motility patterns, including dramatic and effective escape responses. M. pulex only fed while motionless and responded only to motile prey by either an attack or an escape. Both the attack and escape...

We study the qualitative properties of population cycles in a predator-prey system where genetic variability allows contemporary rapid evolution of the prey. Previous numerical studies have found that prey evolution in response to changing predation risk can have major quantitative and qualitative effects on predator-prey cycles, including: (1) large increases in cycle period, (2) changes in ph...

Studies of prey detection have typically focused on how search image affects the capture of cryptic items. This study also considers how background vegetation influences cryptic prey detection. Blue jays, Cyanocitta cristata, searched digitized images for two Catocala moths: C. ilia, which is cryptic on oak, and C. relicta, which is cryptic on birch. Some images contained moths while others did...

In freshwater environments, chemosensory cues play an important role in predator-prey interactions. Prey use a variety of chemosensory cues to detect and avoid predators. However, whether predators use the chemical cues released by disturbed or stressed prey has received less attention. Here we tested the hypothesis that the disturbance cue cortisol, in conjunction with visual cues of prey, ele...

Similar to the model studied in [11], it is assumed that the parasite under consideration is a microparasite so that the parasite population is not explicitly modeled in the interaction. There are only two interacting species prey and predator in the model. Individuals in each species are classified as either infected or uninfected. Let x1 and x2 denote the uninfected and infected prey populati...

This paper considers the evolution of phenotypic traits in a community comprising the populations of predators and prey subject to Allee effect. The evolutionary model is constructed from a deterministic approximation of the stochastic process of mutation and selection. Firstly, we investigate the ecological and evolutionary conditions that allow for continuously stable strategy and evolutionar...